Washington - Jan 06, 2004 - NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe today announced plans to name the landing site of the Mars Spirit rover in honor of the astronauts who died in the tragic accident of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February. The area in the vast flatland of the Gusev Crater where Spirit landed this weekend will be called the Columbia Memorial Station.
Sydney - Jan 06, 2004 - The Monty Python song always look on the bright side of life comes to mind as we contemplate the apparent loss of the Beagle 2 Mars lander. By now, repeated attempts to contact the spacecraft have failed, and it seems reasonable to conclude that we will never hear from it.
Pasadena (JPL) Jan 05, 2004 - The US robot probe Spirit on Monday snapped the first full-color images of its surroundings on Mars, pieced together by NASA to form a panoramic view and stunning first postcard from the red planet.
Paris - Jan 05, 2004 - ESA's Mars Express spacecraft successfully executed an essential planned manoeuvre to reduce its orbit around the Red Planet January 4 at 1313 UTC. A five minute burn of its main engine brought Mars Express from an orbit apocentre (highest point) of 190,000 km to 40,000 km with a pericentre (lowest point) of about 250 km.
Pasadena (JPL) Jan 05, 2004 - NASA has begun receiving high resolution color photographs of Mars from the Spirit rover and is processing them for release sometime later Monday, officials here said.
Pasadena (JPL) Jan 04, 2004 - NASA's Spirit Rover is starting to examine its new surroundings, revealing a vast flatland well suited to the robot's unprecedented mobility and scientific toolkit. Spirit has told us that it is healthy, Jennifer Trosper of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said today. Trosper is Spirit mission manager for operations on Mars' surface. The rover remains perched on its lander platform, and the next nine days or more will be spent preparing for egress, or rolling off, onto the martian surface.
Pasadena (JPL) Jan 04, 2004 - Anyone who's been blindfolded and spun around knows how hard it is to pin the tail on the donkey, even though players are pointed in the right direction when they last look at their target. To land in a precise location on Mars after traveling over 300 million miles, navigators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had to overcome the head-spinning challenges of calculating the exact speeds of a rotating Earth, a rotating Mars, and a rotating spacecraft, while they all simultaneously are spinning in their own radical orbits around the Sun.
Pasadena (AFP) Jan 03, 2004 - A US-made robotic rover was to touch down on the bumpy surface of Mars early Sunday after a seven-month space odyssey, to begin the most ambitious exploration of the red planet ever undertaken.
Pasadena (AFP) Jan 03, 2004 - NASA's Spirit rover sent its first images of Mars to jubilant scientists here early Sunday after surviving a jarring landing on the red planet, an achievement so stunning it left mission managers almost speechless.
Pasadena - Jan 01, 2004 - Biff Starling - one of two intrepid spacefarers in The Planetary Society's web adventure, the Astrobot Diaries - is preparing for arrival on Mars when NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit bounces down on Saturday, January 3, 2004.
Hunstville - Jan 01, 2004 - On January 3, Spirit, NASA's 400-pound rover, is scheduled to land on what may be a dried-up lake bed on Mars. There's not much doubt: this site contained a body of liquid water, at least for some amount of time, says Jim Garvin, NASA's Lead Scientist for Mars Exploration.
It may even be that the same short-lived thin films of liquid water -- forming briefly but repeatedly on the surfaces of larger Martian rocks throughout the…
Pasadena - Dec 30, 2003 - Leave it to Bill Nye the Science Guy to turn a traditional piece of calibration equipment into a really cool, state-of-the-art scientific instrument. As he was looking over the designs for instruments to be carried aboard NASA's 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander, Nye noticed that the solar-panel calibration device for the lander's Pancam panoramic camera - a small aluminum square with an upright post in the center of it - looked familiar.
London - Dec 30, 2003 - As part of the Media update on 27th December, Professor Alan Wells (Lander Operations Control Centre, University of Leicester) outlined details of the work being undertaken by the Beagle 2 team to assess the current situation. A specialist team, titled the Analysis and Recovery Think Tank, has been established to concentrate on understanding the reasons for Beagle 2's apparent failure to make contact with Earth, and to address the steps that may be taken to resolve these problems.
Pasadena - Dec 30, 2003 - The Cornell University-developed, mast-mounted panoramic camera, called the Pancam, on board the rovers Spirit and Opportunity will provide the clearest, most-detailed Martian landscapes ever seen.
Pasadena - Dec 30, 2003 - NASA's Spirit rover spacecraft fired its thrusters for 3.4 seconds on Friday, Dec. 26, to make a slight and possibly final correction in its flight path about one week before landing on Mars.
